Meeting Cao Cao (1)
The eunuch Wang Fu came sprinting barefoot all the way to the imperial envoy, dropped straight to his knees, and burst into loud, unrestrained sobs.
Watching him, the envoy — Cao Cao — wore an expression of genuine discomfort.
"Mengde, Mengde... Please. Spare me. Just let me live..."
Cao Cao patted the eunuch on the back.
"It's all right, Uncle Wang Fu. It's all right. I didn't come here to arrest you."
At that, Wang Fu stopped crying and lifted his head.
The eunuch's face glistened with tears and snot. Cao Cao had to work not to grimace.
"You... you didn't come to take me?"
"His Majesty did order you back to Luoyang. But I'll only be loading Ha Yu, Tian Yan, and Zhang Min into the prison carts."
A flicker of relief crossed Wang Fu's face. It drowned almost at once in fresh terror.
"Th-th-th-then once he summons me to Luoyang, he truly won't press charges? He won't, will he?"
Cao Cao thought, privately, that that bastard Liu Hong was never a man you could trust — but he smiled all the same.
"I'm sure he won't. You can rest easy, I promise."
"Mengde! I... I was a junior your grandfather held dear...!"
"I know. I know that well."
Why did every last eunuch start invoking his grandfather the moment they were desperate? Cao Cao felt a flicker of irritation.
"You, you may not remember, but whenever your grandfather came to the palace carrying little you in his arms, I used to play with you all the time...!"
"How could I ever forget?"
Of course he remembered no such thing. Back then, how many eunuchs had there been, all scrambling to curry favor with his grandfather and with him?
"Uncle, please get ready to return to Luoyang with me. I'll only be taking the... criminals His Majesty ordered loaded into the prison carts."
Wang Fu sniffled a couple of times and staggered to his feet. Cao Cao steadied him.
"Thank you..."
"Don't mention it. Ah — once you're in Luoyang, Father will host a consolation banquet. Rest off the journey, and while you wait I'll put in a good word with His Majesty."
Wang Fu pictured the banquet Cao Song would throw. He himself was a eunuch of considerable power and had amassed a fair fortune, but it was nothing compared to the wealth Cao Song had been accumulating since the days of his adoptive father, Cao Teng. And Cao Song had a gift for making money grow. The banquet might well feature food and wine that even most eunuchs had never tasted...
The thought seemed to settle his nerves a little.
He did not think he could endure this without clinging to something — not if he let himself remember those cold, cold eyes of Liu Hong's.
Cao Cao ordered his attendants to show Wang Fu inside, then turned toward the "criminals."
Toward Ha Yu, Tian Yan, and Zhang Min, who knelt with their foreheads pressed to the earth, waiting on the Emperor's word.
"Mm."
He flicked his fingers. A subordinate brought forward the imperial edict.
Cao Cao snapped open a length of silk so fine that even in Luoyang most commoners would never set eyes on it in a lifetime, and prepared to read what was written there.
"...Mm."
He seemed to hesitate a moment. Then he spoke.
Therefore, in order to thoroughly investigate the full circumstances of this defeat and to assign responsibility, the three criminals shall be loaded into prison carts and escorted under guard to Luoyang.
Having read that much, he had his men help the three of them to their feet.
"Well, edicts are always a bit overwrought, aren't they. The wording makes you sound like the worst villains under heaven... There are a good many people listening, so I'll simply follow the procedure."
Zhang Min nodded.
"I'm grateful for the consideration. You're a Gentleman Consultant now, was it?"
"Yes. Gentleman Consultant Cao Cao."
"I remember when you served as Captain of the Northern District, and how strictly you upheld the law. I sometimes wonder whether the world is too hasty in dividing men into the Turbid Stream and the Pure Stream."
Cao Cao smiled faintly.
"I am the one who should thank you for those words, General."
"Will you be departing at once?"
"I have two or three days' leeway. If you use that time to settle your affairs..."
"Thank you."
After sending the three of them away, Cao Cao tipped his head and looked up at the sky, taking in the gathered crowd as well.
Unfamiliar faces of Bingzhou. An unfamiliar Bingzhou sky.
So this is the place Liu Hong's tyranny wounded so deeply.
Cao Cao had come to Bingzhou?
As an imperial envoy?
No matter how I looked at him, he couldn't have been older than his twenties. He probably was in his twenties.
Judging by the way the eunuch Wang Fu treated him, his influence even at that age was considerable.
That, more likely than not, had less to do with Cao Cao himself than with the shadow of his grandfather, Cao Teng.
The first treacherous ministers anyone meets through the Three Kingdoms are the ten Regular Attendants — the Ten Regular Attendants.
The eunuch Cao Teng was their senior. Their teacher, even.
The grandson of a man like that would wield enormous influence not only among the eunuchs but throughout the political world of Luoyang.
Combine that with Cao Cao's own ability, and the effect would be greater still.
Cao Cao. One of the great pillars of the Three Kingdoms.
A man called the end of the Han as an ancient empire, and the beginning of medieval China.
Some belittle him because his dynasty, Wei, was short-lived. I believe he occupies a clear and necessary place between antiquity and the medieval age.
...Separate from all of that.
"Sister Ying!"
For some time now I had been keeping Du Ying in the tent where I stayed, on the pretext of lessons for a Divine Maiden, or of helping with the daily life of a prince.
Having someone to look after me was what had finally persuaded Father — Yufuluo — to let me keep a tent of my own.
Though lately, to be honest, the look in his eyes had less and less to do with a son. He was mindful of my "sacredness." He was looking at something else.
Whatever Yufuluo thought, I would play the part of Yufuluo's son faithfully.
And now that I had slipped a little further from his sight, my movements were freer. That, at least, was welcome.
...But that was not what mattered right now.
"Bao?"
Du Ying, dressed now like a Xiongnu woman — more precisely, like a Xiongnu priestess — stared at me in bewilderment. She seemed to have been cleaning my tent until a moment ago.
"Sister Ying!"
I caught her by the hand and pulled her inside.
"What's wrong, Bao?"
"Until I come back, you are not to set one foot outside this tent. Not if someone calls for you. Not even if my grandfather or my father calls for you. Do you understand?"
"O-okay..."
When a person said to commune with the gods speaks in that tone, people assume there must be a reason.
Good. She would not come out.
And why was I doing this? Because in the original history, this woman becomes Cao Cao's concubine.
Of all the people who could stand in the way of my intention to see Guan Yu and Du Ying's love fulfilled, he was the greatest obstacle.
If Cao Cao saw her face, fell for her, and decided to take her as a concubine...
Well.
Here in Bingzhou, if I simply charged in without thinking it through, I could probably kill him.
...Should I kill him?
Kill him now, and the hegemon who will hold the Central Plains south of the Yellow River between the years 192 and 199 vanishes forever.
The king who will later pacify Hebei and lay the foundation of Wei vanishes forever.
If Wei disappears, then the single greatest obstacle to my — to Liu Bao of the Xiongnu's — conquest of northern China disappears with it.
But...
Kill Cao Cao while he is here as an imperial envoy, and it is war with the Han at once.
Praised as I am now as Grand Shaman, I could probably incite the Xiongnu into revolt, at least.
The problem is this: even having lost a great army in the campaign against Tanshihuai, the national power of the Han itself has not gone anywhere.
There is that argument, isn't there.
That the brilliant figures of the Three Kingdoms, the dazzling history of its wars, were nothing less than four hundred years of accumulated Han capacity exploding all at once.
That by the time the three states had fought and fought and fought their way to unification under the Sima clan's Jin, that capacity was spent, and the Sixteen Kingdoms arrived so hollowly in its wake.
The argument itself is full of holes. But one thing is certain.
The Han is far stronger than the Southern Xiongnu right now.
A full-scale war means certain defeat.
I could throw the empire's northern frontier into chaos for a while. I could hasten the coming age of turmoil.
But that would only be doing a favor for the Yellow Turbans yet to appear, and for Tanshihuai's Xianbei empire.
So...
I cannot kill Cao Cao here.
I need another method.
Another way to make use of Cao Cao.
The original Xiongnu Liu Bao, the one who existed before I possessed this body, had known Cao Cao as well.
The man who on one hand held out money and on the other threatened a punitive campaign — and took away his wife, Cai Yan.
Ha. Looked at that way, both Guan Yu and I had a woman stolen by Cao Cao.
Cai Yan remarried a man named Dong Si through Cao Cao's matchmaking, so it might be a little different from Guan Yu, who had her taken from him directly.
More than that, though, Cao Cao's real danger lay elsewhere.
In my memory, after Yufuluo died around 195, Cao Cao exploited the split between Huchuquan, who became Chanyu, and me, who became Left Wise King.
Huchuquan held eastern Bingzhou. I held the west. Cao Cao — and after him Wei, and after Wei, Jin — made a policy of keeping it exactly that way.
Checked by Huchuquan and his descendants, reunifying the Xiongnu of the Hetao Plateau became enormously difficult.
If I cannot kill Cao Cao here in Bingzhou, I at least have to stop that from happening.
How?
No idea.
I'll meet him first and think.
Bringing Lü Bu along might complicate the conversation, so I went alone to where Cao Cao was staying.
Women needed caution in front of Cao Cao. So did men.
He poached capable men as readily as anything else. If I let him cross paths with Lü Bu, he might take him back to Luoyang before Dong Zhuo ever got the chance.
Or, conversely, two men who had been mortal enemies in the original history might draw blades on each other then and there.
Fortunately, Cao Cao's lodging had no visitors. It was nothing like Cai Yong's place of exile.
No doubt because he was of the Turbid Stream, a eunuch's descendant — not of the Pure Stream, from whom one might hope for a character evaluation or a recommendation.
I told the gatekeeper who I was, and before long I was granted leave to enter.
Surprisingly easy.
Hmm... natural enough, perhaps, given how interested Cao Cao had always been in Daoism?
Being the Chanyu's great-grandson would have piqued his curiosity. But the fact that I was a Hu shaman who served Tengri, the Heaven God of the Xiongnu, seemed to interest him more.
I was led before Cao Cao, offered my greetings, and studied his face.
He was definitely smaller in build than Lü Bu or Sun Jian.
But... he did not quite match the sharp-featured face portrayed in so many versions of him.
If anything, he looked open. Amiable.
"I am Luanti Bao, prince of the Xiongnu Right Guli King."
"Gentleman Consultant Cao Cao."
Cao Cao smiled gently and rolled shut the bamboo slips he had been reading, the strips clattering together.
"You seem quite young, yet you speak the Han tongue remarkably well. So, prince of the Xiongnu — what business brings you to this Cao Cao?"
"I have come because I have something to say regarding the failure of this campaign against Tanshihuai."
"Worried we might pin the failure on the Xiongnu? Don't be. In a case like this, we do not punish those who held no authority to decide."
"That is not it."
"Then what did you come to say?"
"If, before any misjudgment or incompetence on the part of the Generals of the Household and the Colonel — if someone had been serving as Tanshihuai's spy, and passing on secrets... would Gentleman Consultant Cao be willing to help expose him?"
Cao Cao's expression changed. The indulgent, almost fond smile he had been wearing as he looked at me vanished.
At last, sharpness settled over the young Cao Cao's face.